A variety of residential and commercial buildings have HVAC equipment that may, for example, provide conditioning such as heating, cooling, ventilation, filtration, humidification, and/or dehumidification to improve the environment within the residential and/or commercial building.
In some instances, a building may be divided into two or more zones that may be independently conditioned in order to provide more precise control of the environment within the building. A thermostat may be located within each zone, and each thermostat may be electrically connected to a zone control panel that is configured to receive signals (e.g. requests) from the thermostats and provide appropriate commands to HVAC equipment in response to the requests.
Each thermostat may have a number of electrical connections that need to be made with the zone control panel for proper operating of the system. During or after an installation process, it may be desirable to confirm that each electrical wire or lead from each thermostat is connected to the appropriate pin or connection of the zone control panel. A current method of testing these connections requires that an installer set each thermostat to a particular condition such as heat on, air conditioning on, or the like, and then move to the zone control panel and manually check the state of the appropriate pins on the zone control panel with a voltmeter. This method of testing has proven to be fairly labor intensive and error-prone, particularly when dealing with HVAC systems that have a relatively large number of zones and/or include a relatively large number of control signals between the thermostats and the zone control panel. In order to save time, it has been found that many installers often only check the voltage state of some of the pins. For example, if the installer has set a particular thermostat to call for heat, the installer may only check the voltage on the heat call pin (e.g. W pin), but not the other pins. This may increase the likelihood that an erroneous wire connection goes undetected.
A need remains, therefore, for improved testing methods for verifying connections between a zone control panel and the thermostats connected to the zone control panel. A need also remains for an improved zone control panel that may facilitate such methods.